Dell 8400 Dimension does not recognize WD 500GB Caviar Black SATA drive

I have a related post about a BSOD after a Windows Home Server restore, but I seem to have a more basic problem.  I added the new drive as a second drive but when I go into the bios to activate it, it does not recognize this new drive. The old drive is a 160GB Seagate SATA drive that came with the system about 6 years ago.

The odd thing is that WHS seemed to have no trouble working with this drive when it ran the restore.  I have the original bios A01 - do I need to upgrade it?  It still begs the question of how WHS was able to make it work.  I also downloaded and created a bootable CD with data lifeguard software and it could not find a WD drive.

Thanks.

6/14/11 Update

Tonight I removed the new 500GB drive and connected it as an external USB drive. The new drive contained what I expected - a restored image from my original drive thanks to Windows Home Server (WHS). So here are my conclusions:

  1. There is no need to update the bios because WHS was able to write to the new drive with the current bios

  2. Starting over by doing a fresh install of Windows XP is likely not an option because the bios doesn’t recognize the drive (I tried both RAID/AHCI and RAID/ATA). In any event it’s not a desirable option.

  3. The new drive is functioning fine.

So the question is this: what did WHS server do to allow the drive to be recognized and written to that is not in place now on my PC?

The drive is now visible to the bios as a 500GB drive (no bios upgrade required).  I called WD support and they said to jumper pins 1 and 2.  When I did that, I was able to see the drive in the bios as a 500GB drive.  No bios update was required.  Now to fix the BSOD after the WHS restore but that’s another thread.

A jumper? That alters how the drives behave, good thing =)